My thanks to Tony Thomas for this illuminating piece of science-history, first published at Quadrant online.

A great embarrassment to the warming-catastrophic community is that 40 years ago the climatology scare was about cooling and onset of an ice age. Warmists today go, “Pooh! That cooling stuff then was just a few hyped-up articles in magazines. Cooling never got any traction in the real science community!”

Really? Then explain this away…

Letter from the Australian Federal Minister for Science, W.L. (Bill) Morrison, to the President of the Academy of Science, Professor Badger, January 9, 1975:

Dear Professor Badger,I am writing on this occasion to enquire if the Academy could assist the Government by examining, and reporting on, claims recently made in the media, and apparently also by competent scientists that the earth’s climate is changing and that a new ice-age could be on the way.

A few years ago, I started a wikipedia page on the Gore Effect; the uncanny phenomenon which unleashes snow, hail, torrential rain, icy winds and sleet on the venues where Al Gore is speaking about global warming. The instances are too numerous to list. My page got deleted within a few months by the usual suspects. But it was reborn when another wiki user put up a much more detailed and better referenced version, and I thought it unassailable. But no, the usual suspects are at it again:

Maybe big Al has been armtwisting Jimmy Wales with the promise of a big donation on condition it goes. Who knows.

I’m of the opinion that before getting into the complexity of numerical modelling, it’s wise to put considerable effort into trying to understand the physical processes at work in the climate system, and the origins of the energy flows that drive them. David Evans’ recent series of posts over at Jo Nova’s site have generated a lot of interesting discussion (despite being roundly ignored by Anthony Watts at WUWT), and I think we can shed some light on the ‘mysterious 11yr lag’ between solar input and climate response.

Once again Pierre L. Gosselin brings fascinating content from the German speaking world

Distinct solar imprint on climate What’s more worrisome,

Schlüchter’s findings show that cold periods can strike very rapidly. Near the edge of Mont Miné Glacier his team found huge tree trunks and discovered that they all had died in just a single year. The scientists were stunned.

“The year of death could be determined to be exactly 8195 years before present. The oxygen isotopes in the Greenland ice show there was a marked cooling around 8200.”

That finding, Schlüchter states, confirmed that the sun is the main driver in climate change.

. . . suggesting that Dansgaard-Oeschger events resulted from a combination of the effects of sea ice and ice shelves—structures that help define the margins of ice sheets—to account for both the rapid and the slower parts of the cycle.

On Saturday My lady and I travelled with friends Ian and Susan down the Scott Polar Research Institute to a talk given by Rich Pancost, the professor at the head of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol. This outfit is comprised of a small team which co-ordinates cross disciplinary effort from other faculties at the University to help address the university’s ‘two big themes’ of environment and health.

A new paper in Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A) finds that cosmogenic nucleides in a section of Epica dome C covering 325-336 kyrs ago doesn’t exhibit Abreu et al’s planetary periods. They conclude that solar variability might have been different then. They don’t consider that Epica ice cores might not be telling them what they think they’re telling them.

Here’s the abstract

No evidence for planetary influence on solar activity 330 000 years ago

Clive has published an interesting series of articles on his blog. Here is food for thought.

Does the Moon trigger interglacials?Posted on January 10, 2014 by Clive Best

Why did the last 8 glacial periods only end when the earth’s orbit around the sun reached maximum eccentricity ? This is the real unsolved mystery of the Ice Ages as discussed in previous posts and recently on scienceofdoom.

Phenomenology of Ice Ages

What causes interglacials – part 1

Part 2: The real cause of interglacials – Resonant dust clouds

With the last of these posts I finally thought there could be a solution to this mystery based on resonant interplanetary dust, but alas I could find no evidence whatsoever in TSI data and dismissed the idea. However I now realise that perhaps there is another solution which may have been looking us in the face all the time.

Paul Homewood and I spotted this one coming a number of weeks ago. The mainstream media is now picking up the story. I suggest people consider voting for the only party with a sensible energy policy. This from the Independent:

Currently, fuel poverty refers to those households that need to spend more than 10 per cent of their income on fuel “to maintain an adequate level of warmth”. But under the new definition, contained in the Government’s forthcoming Energy Bill, which could be passed by the end of the year, it will apply only to households which need to spend more than average on fuel to keep warm and who would be left with “a residual income below the official poverty line” if they did.

The Talkshop’s favourite weatherman Paul Hudson has been to see Mike Lockwood. It seems the fragile ‘consensus’ on the inability of solar variation to affect climate is coming apart. Now Lockwood is saying a new Maunder or Dalton type minimum is likely upon us, and could cause a general downturn in climatic conditions. This is what we’ve been telling the mainstream solar science community for the last four years. From Paul’s BBC blog:

It’s known by climatologists as the ‘Little Ice Age’, a period in the 1600s when harsh winters across the UK and Europe were often severe.

The severe cold went hand in hand with an exceptionally inactive sun, and was called the Maunder solar minimum.

Now a leading scientist from Reading University has told me that the current rate of decline in solar activity is such that there’s a real risk of seeing a return of such conditions.

I’ve been to see Professor Mike Lockwood to take a look at the work he has been conducting into the possible link between solar activity and climate patterns.

According to Professor Lockwood the late 20th century was a period when the sun was unusually active and a so called ‘grand maximum’ occurred around 1985.

Prof. Nir J. Shaviv, who is a member of the Racah Institute of Physics in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. According to PhysicaPlus: “…his research interests cover a wide range of topics in astrophysics, most are related to the application of fluid dynamics, radiation transfer or high energy physics to a wide range of objects – from stars and compact objects to galaxies and the early universe. His studies on the possible relationships between cosmic rays intensity and the Earth’s climate, and the Milky Way’s Spiral Arms and Ice Age Epochs on Earth were widely echoed in the scientific literature, as well as in the general press.” — From Nir’s blog [1]

Nir gave a lecture at EIKE (Europäisches Institut für Klima und Energie [2]) January 2013. In the lecture at EIKE he flows through some of what is wrong with IPCC assertions and models, then drops in extraterrestrial, solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, showing some neat plots. Asserts that solar accounts for a major proportion of whatever temperature change has gone on and how IPCC omit critical factors. Models are over-sensitive.

From the Talkshop’s favourite weatherman at the BBC Paul Hudson comes news of a possible run of colder weather and climate for the UK. This will be no surprise for talkshop regulars, where we have been predicting a solar slowdown for a few 11y cycles since the blog started in 2009. Nice to get some confirming support from Paul and good to see him sticking his neck out on a 20+ year weather prediction.

NASA last week confirmed their prediction that the current solar cycle 24 is likely to be the weakest since 1906.

Intriguingly, the current solar cycle shows a striking similarity with solar cycle 5 which was also very weak, with the same double peak as the current cycle, and ran from approximately the mid 1790s to around 1810.

Solar cycle 6 was weaker still and stretched from around 1810 to the early 1820s.

Solar cycles 5 and 6 were so unusual that they were named the Dalton solar minimum after meteorologist John Dalton and coincided with a period of increasingly cold winters and poor summers.

Earlier today, I spotted the wailing and gnashing of teeth beginning over the fact that the airborne fraction of co2 is about to pass 400 parts per million – 0.04% of the atmosphere. Peter Gleick was one of the protagonists.

Is the North Pole going to melt entirely? Are the Arctic regions warming up with prospect of a great climatic change in that part of the world? Science is asking these questions (says “Popular Science Siftings”). Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers who sail the seas around Spitsbergen and the Eastern Arctic all point to a radical change in climatic conditions, with hitherto unheard-of high temperatures on that part of the earth’s surface. Observations to that effect have covered the last five years during which the warmth has been steadily increasing. In August the Norwegian Department of Commerce sent an expedition to Spitsbergen and Bear Island under the leadership of Dr. Adolf Hoel, professor of geology in the University of Christiania, the object in view being to survey and chart areas productive of coal and other minerals.